The Vegetarian is a
novel about non-conformity in a highly conforming society. In the opening
section of the book, Yeong-hye, an ‘ordinary wife’ decides to become vegetarian
after experiencing a recurrent bad dream. The people around her, her husband
and wider family, do not understand. Apparently it is uncommon in South Korean
society for people other than Buddhist monks to become vegetarian. What follows
are three connected stories, beginning with Yeong-hye then moving on to her
brother-in-law and then her sister. Each is affected by Yeong-hye’s
vegetarianism is slightly different way.
The story begins
with Yeong-hye, as described by her husband: “Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as
completely unremarkable in every way.” Yet what follows is the story of a
woman who is anything but unremarkable. Yeong-hye suffers from extremely vivid
and disturbing dreams. Dreams of blood and slabs of meat, dreams of sucking
down blood, blood on her skin and clothes. These dreams drive Yeong-hye to
become a vegetarian; she can no longer face eating meat and can barely sleep,
she is so unsettled by them. Her husband reacts without understanding, he can
only see that Yeong-hye is behaving strangely and this strangeness is quite the
opposite of what her husband desires. Instead he desires a plain and ordinary
life. Yeong-hye’s behaviour does not fit into this.
That Yeong-hye’s
husband and her family find her switch to vegetarianism disturbing becomes
quite apparent very quickly. What I found disturbing as a reader was the
reaction to Yeong-hye’s choice: no one attempts to understand her, they only
seek to force her to comply. In the case of her husband, this means ignoring
the problem and trying to ignore Yeong-hye, as he describes here:
“I sometimes told myself that, even though the woman I
was living with was a little odd, nothing particularly bad would come of it. I
thought I could get by perfectly well just thinking of her as a stranger, or
no, as a sister, or even a maid, someone who puts food on the table and keeps
the house in good order. “
This ignorance
descends into marital rape, which her husband describes in such a matter of
fact way it made me feel slightly sick. In the case of Yeong-hye’s family their
approach to her refusal to eat meat is an attempt at force feeding, followed by
physical violence on the part of her father, which results in Yeong-hye
slitting her wrist with a fruit knife. Consequently Yeong-hye is admitted to
hospital and, following this, a mental institution. By this time Yeong-hye is
desperately thin and emotionally distant. No one can reach her, and she clearly
doesn’t want to be reached by anybody.
The story then
moves to Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law, an artist who becomes sexually obsessed
with Yeong-hye. He confesses to have always been more attracted to Yeong-hye
than his wife, and his wife’s casual mention of Yeong-hye’s ‘Mongolian Mark’ on
her back send him spiraling into an obsession over which he has no control.
This obsession takes the form of a particular sexual fantasy: the idea of
painting Yeong-hye’s body with flowers and recording someone (himself) having
sex with her. He cannot get this vision out of his mind. Against
his instincts, he approaches Yeong-hye (now released from the mental institution
and reintegrating into society) and asks her to model for his art. To his
surprise, she agrees. Though his motives are sexual in nature, he is surprised
at his own reaction to Yeong-hye once he has painted her:
“Only then did he realize what it was that had shocked
him when he’d first seen her lying prone on the sheet. This was the body of a
beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a
body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass
as carnal desire, not for her – rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced
was the very life that her body represented.”
Eventually he
follows through on his desire, finally recording himself having sex with
Yeong-hye. It is at this point his activity is discovered by his wife In-hye.
Both Yeong-hye and he are captured and sent to a mental institution.
Here the story
turns to In-hye as she tries to come to terms with what has happened in her own
life, and the slow descent into madness of her younger sister Yeong-hye. In-hye’s
story is the least impassioned of the three, and perhaps the most poignant.
In-hye reflects on Yeong-hye’s state as she visits the hospital on the day they
attempt to insert a feeding tube into Yeong-hye’s nose. By this point Yeong-hye
is convinced she has transformed from something human into a plant, that she
need only plant herself by her hands into the cool soil of the forest for her
transformation to be complete. We see In-hye struggling between what she is
supposed to do (force feed Yeong-hye) and what Yeong-hye wants her to do (let
her go). She reminisces on their childhood, the way in which Yeong-hye had been
abused by their father and her cowardice in never confronting it. As though she
could. This culminates in a realization that the whole of her life, she had
never really lived. As she describes here:
“The feeling that she had never really lived in this
world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a
child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”
These three
stories, approaching the subject in very different ways, show three characters
undergoing a process of self-discovery, of transformation. Each character
confronts the social norm, and finds themselves set against it. In the case of
Yeong-hye the process is violent, disturbing and ultimately self-defeating. Is
she mad? It is a question the book neither asks nor answers. Yet Yeong-hye represents
the person standing at odds with the social contract, the silent promise we
each make not to rock the boat, not to be too individual, to behave in
accordance with the wishes of others. In the case of her brother in law, it is
his sexual desire which is at odds with the world; his desire to take part in a
physical union which is extraordinary and consuming. In-hye desires only to
live, but is restrained by fear from doing so. Only in the end, and through the
extremity of Yeong-hye’s actions is she able to let go.
The Vegetarian is
an astonishing book, powerful and magnetic and deeply disturbing. I found it
inspiring and terrifying in equal parts; in particularly Yeong-hye’s story
which, seeming so ordinary from a ‘western’ viewpoint, the way in which the
people surrounded her reacted is perhaps a sadly familiar story. There was a
disturbing lack of understanding, a lack of desire to understand which was
driven solely by the need for things to go on as painlessly as possible.
Yeong-hye forces those around her, reader included, to consider what it means
to live, and not just to live but to live a life which has meaning and personal
service, not just for the good of others. A read as extraordinary as its cover (which is stunning).